Proper Bass Guitar Playing Techniques

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Carl Shepard with expertvillage.com. We are talking about some basic beginner techniques here, one thing you are going to want to know is how to play a note. When you are playing an open string, it is going to be a lot different than when you are actually playing some frets, so what you need to do is make sure that when you do play a fret, your finger will take the third fret of the E string for example, your finger needs to be in the middle of the fret, you play it up here, it is going to buzz, possibly like that. It is a nasty sound and you don’t want that, if it is in the middle then it will be nice and clear, and you won’t have any problems. You also want to worry about your sustain, if you need to sustain, you need to keep it off and just lift your finger up and then if you need it to ring out a little more then you can just add a little vibrato make it nice and ringy there. So those are things you want to keep in mind when you are just trying to fret. When you are doing exercises and you do a scale you want to use all four of your fingers in your left hand and the more practice you get with that the better you will be. "